Fedirighi demonstrated the “Slide Over” feature to bring up the Notes app on his iPad while he continued to browse the web in Safari. It’s the perfect innovation for users who might want to, for instance, watch exotic pornography while they, for example, consulted their notes for a news item about Apple product announcements.

The Apple Watch: Some people really like it. Other don’t. A lot of people has an opinion about it, even if they’ve only read about it.

That said, a lot of people who also own other Apple products agree having a watch on your wrist is great because finally you don’t have to take your phone out of your pocket to check the time, you can just look at your wrist and voilá!–there’s a time-keeping device, like, right there.

Also, it’s very stylish. Gunmetal grey is just one of the colors, and there are also bands with buckles. Those out-of-touch old brands could learn a thing or two here.

A lot of people have written or made podcasts about setting their alarms and getting up in the middle of the night to order one, because that’s perfectly acceptable behavior for grown people.

Battery life is also a thing – the watch works, like, almost a full day, that’s 18 hours or something, so you can charge it when you’re asleep and don’t need to check your watch. That’s the sort of neat detail that sets Apple apart. Nice one, Jony.

Anyway, this has been me writing about other people writing about living with the Apple Watch for a week.

I’m sure I’m not the only one getting a bit tired of MC Siegler and his ilk complaining about e-mail. We get it, you want us to use something else, and preferably – I’m just taking a wild guess here – a service you’ve invested in.

[E-mail’s] the worst thing ever for about a billion reasons.

Siegler famously invested in Path, which was hard to miss if you read tech news, since he kept shilling for it. Later, Path proceeded to copy all the users’ contacts and spammed them all with requests to join the service, even after users deleted the app. (Nobody likes Path very much anymore.)

Here’s the thing about e-mail, though: I can open an account with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and a score of others; I can even host it myself if I want. (I do). Once I’ve done that, I can send e-mail from any of these services to any of the others, including the self-hosted one, and the recipient will get it, regardless of provider. Unless, of course, you live in a dictatorship or some hacker suspects you have nude pics lying around or you can’t figure out how to set up IMAP. Even so.

Twitter, Path, Wattsapp, GTalk/Chat/Hangouts/Facebook Messenger make up just a tiny selection of messaging services out there, and while they’re often based on the same technology, pretty much none of them can actually talk to each other, thanks to the proprietary stuff that gets added. Superior communication platforms, my ass!

The one thing I’m pretty sure of is that e-mail will still be around when all these other services have gone to seed. E-mail is universal and open. This is frankly fantastic, and unsurprisingly, came around before the whoring out monetization of the Internet.

Sure, e-mail isn’t great for everything, and yes, it can be clunky, but it was born of the open Internet and after all these years, it still delivers on the promise of limitless, instantaneous communication these other services promise – and fail – to deliver. All this, and not a walled garden in sight.

Apple just announced they’re killing both iPhoto and Aperture, and will be rolling out a new application simply called “Photos” with Yosemite, their coming OS.

I’ve been using Aperture for a few years and I think it’s a pity it’ll be retired. It was both powerful and easy to use. And of course, it’s not like Tim Cook is coming to my house to uninstall Aperture when Yosemite goes live, despite what rabid Apple haters may like to believe. While Apple isn’t nostalgic by any means (that’s its business model and philosophy, and users should know that going in), it’ll most likely be a few updates until it starts to break. That means at least a few more years of life.

So there’s no real reason for me to leave Aperture any time soon, and I’ll have plenty of time to master Lightroom for when that time comes. (I know Capture One is supposed to be good too, but I already use Creative Cloud, so that seems the easiest way out.)

Lack of updates notwithstanding, Aperture feels pretty features complete already, at least for my basic needs. I want to beome better at Photoshop, as it’s both a fun tool and a useful skillset for a designer, but in all likelihood, the new Photos app will be more than enough for my daily needs. It does amuse me, however, how the simple knowledge that Aperture will be dying at a remote point in the future is enough to get me scrambling for something else.

Finally, I can’t help but notice that the “i”-era Apple started seems to be winding down, even in Cupertino. Ah, well. It was fun while it lasted.

WP gives people the illusion of content; they don’t actually have to have anything to say as long as they have a fancy theme and a big ol’ slider. Flat-file systems make sense for people who want to focus on content and content alone (WP can do this, too), whereas WP has become a fully-featured CMS.

This reminds me of the people who mistakenly claim designers are so dumb they think they need a Mac to work, when the simpler truth is that most designers like well-designed things*. So I’m sorry, but the above quote is horseshit. Bad content is bad content, and no fancy slider will hide that. Nor does the underlying CMS have anything to do with a blogger’s ability to write, unless it’s so opaque as to be unusable.

Which brings us to the trend du jour: flat file CMSes. While they’re all the rage with developers, I seriously doubt they’ll get much traction with anyone else until they become simpler to use. At the moment, they’re certainly anything but. It comes as no shock that they’re very clearly by developers, for developers. (Mysteriously, the simpler ones also tend to be paid solutions.)

No-one’s denying that WordPress has become one big-ass chunk of code, but your average blogger doesn’t care – he or she needs a tool that’s reasonably easy to use. Logging in to WordPress, clicking “add new post” and writing in the easily fathomable composer is simple. Having to learn markdown and some obscure PHP templating engine is, y’know, less so.

Something’s bound to dislodge WordPress at some point, but it probably won’t be Ghost and it certainly won’t be something you run from the command line after installing various ruby gems or whatever the fuck.

The site is a collection of musings and asides, as well as quotes and links I find interesting and/or useful. I am a keen photographer and a fan of film and literature, and the site reflects my interests.